Reflections on Boston

I was in Boston all of last week for the National Catholic Education Association conference. Here are some highlights.

NUMBER ONE
The opening days of the conference were excellent; I met a number of prospective students and principals who wanted their teachers to consider our courses, but the last day of the conference was dead. I’d given everything away and it was just as well because no one was interested in graduate study, and interest in my neighbors’ products was equally dismal.

So in comes two mid-career teachers and one gasped, “A hall-pass timer! This is the coolest!” Jim Wehrly of Stokes Publishing displayed in the booth next to me various kinds of timers for classrooms.

It was almost as big as the old fashioned board of education, so it would be hard to misplace. “It’s also water-proof,” says Jim—just in case kids drop it into the lavatory sink while washing their hands.

“Does it shock them if they’re late?”

Jim said it didn’t, but I looked to me like he was making a mental note.

“I’d like to record my voice on it,” said the teacher, “so when they’re late they’d hear my voice, ‘Get back to class, get back to class’—and only I could turn it off.”

Despite the excitement, they moved on without buying anything.

NUMBER TWO
I talked briefly with a teacher who looked amazingly like my doctor, except 20 years younger. I told her but she hardly knew what to say. In fact, she looked incredulous, as if her name had just been called for the Hunger Games. Two colleagues appeared and asked what she was doing. She lilted her head and said, “I look like a doctor.” Then they laughed at the assumed absurdity and wandered off.

NUMBER THREE
This is a great walking city, especially if you appreciate grand old buildings. On my three-mile walk to the convention center, I five-story mansion condos built in the late 1800s for the upper-middle class, I am told. Though you can still see the beauty in these great row houses, they have long since been chopped into apartments and now look like over-Botoxed movie stars.

And the grand old churches! They not as big and intricate as European cathedrals, but they are stone-craft works of art. I can’t even imagine how they built them without cranes.

As in many cities, people on the street generally avoid eye contact or look through you.
And yet—and yet—I saw a burley Black policeman (who was big enough to have been a retired New England Patriots lineman)—so here was this big guy making faces at a giggling baby in a stroller. What a great moment!

My next conference is the National Charter School Association in Minneapolis. That’s in late June. Then, it is off to New Orleans in October for the Virtual School Symposium. Students and alumni visits are always appreciated. Please contact me if you can go.